@Dave it's nice to see diversity like that. I love that so many kids today don't even seem to notice differences like skin color - if they do it's a minor detail they don't consider. Kids are a curious group!

With a study that started over 60 years ago when there was a huge social push to conform and be with others like you, I wonder if the study started today, how it might change. But then again I was the oddball that played with the boys while the other girls still thought they had cooties.

I remember a segment of Freakonomics saying companies were much less likely to hire african americans with 'unique' names than if they had common names. This could also add to the pile of reasons for the lack of diversity in IT.

@zerox203- The study started in the 50's and goes to the present. It is modern research. The point of the study was to follow pairs of folks over time to see how lifestyle, genetics, etc affected heart health.

the study was re-purposed for the needs of the other study. Obviously, because we haven't had the ability to do genetic tests in quick and affordable ways until recently, you can bet the study only used the more recent parts of the study and people who are still alive.

There are still limitaitons here (most of the folks were Italian American for example) but it is a modern study.

For some of us I think that we are more driven by our interests than by "comfort" in cases like this we don't tend to care if someone had many traits that we have we just look for one key trait like the love for a hobby or personal goals. Kids tend to be this way because if you catch them young enough their goal is to play and have fun, you put them in a room with other kids who want to play and they will become friends very quickly.

This is definitely an interesting topic, but I'm a little skeptical of the research itself. You said it was piggybacked on research from all the way back in 50s? Why is that? Why didn't the Yale and UYC San Diego researches just do new research from scratch? Just like you suggest, isn't the technology available to collect a much wider variety of information and verify it better too - it seems a little suspect. I'm not overly skeptical of the idea that we might use subconscious genetic markers to pick our friends; I'm just skeptical that a study done with modern technology could confirm it. With so many gaps in how we still understand genetics, aren't there jsut too many variables to control for?

This is nevertheless a topic that pokes at the very deepest questions that we ask ourselves as people. Why do we pick our friends? Moreover, even if we can understand every little thing about human behavior, does that mean we should mess with it? The notion that we would break down making friends to a list of genetic markers evokes images of some the worst sci-fi scenarios one can think of. I'm not quite ready to wear the silver jumpsuit just yet. Maybe some things are best left to the imagination. Imagine being self-conscious about your olfactory senses all the time when talking to (or not talking to) people.

@David, that's a good point and what makes this research so startling. Is that the differences we somehow pick up are so subtle and beyond the usual racial and socioeconomic differences that we typically fixate on as a society. What if we are loner wolves, though? Does that mean there's no one else out there like us?

Sane IT I agree, I don't have any friends that look like me. Part of that I think is I tend to find friends with similar interests and meet many of them in a professional atmosphere. I could see the theory holding true with kids, I do see young children gravitating to kids that look like themselves but even that is not holding up as they get older. It would be interesting to overlay socioeconomic background over the data to see of it made a difference in friend choice.

@Broadway0474, That may be part of it, when I was a kid my dad lived in a largely minority area so when I was at his house I spent the time hanging out with kids that looked nothing like me. If that was it then it carried through to adulthood because my group of friends is still very diverse. I like to think that I look at people for their strengths not their similarities or their differences. If I want to do something I want people around me who are good at what they are doing so I'm less worried about their appearance than I am their performance.

The genetic pressures are more of what I was referring to. I've seen many times that depending on hormone levels woman look for different attributes in men. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see data from an app like Tinder that shows patterns of preferences that vary in cycles that coincide with biological cycles.

I think that adjusting the diversity of friends is fairly easy for some people but for a society as a whole it's incredibly difficult. As you mentioned in the blog post a lot of it is subconscious so people don't realize that they gravitate toward comfortable people. I can't say exactly why I get along with so many different types of people but I suspect it is because I tend to be uncomfortable in general in social situations so I make the most of it and get to know people that have stories to tell that are nothing like mine. It does make life much more interesting, I'll say that much.

@Broadway- Definitely. Opportunity matters for sure. Your brain is going to work differently based on its experiences. At the same time, there are sublte differences even within closed communities. We have a tendency to forget the subtle differences in shades of hair or skin tone sometimes. The brain picks up in these cues as well.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.